I have to recommend Ascent DX - it is free, quite short, but it condenses everything I enjoy about the metroidvania genre I to a bite sized play session.
Tunic is one of the best games ever made, nevermind just in the metroidvania genre. It is good for reasons I can’t tell you without spoiling some of the magic. Trust me!
Phoenotopia Awakening was stupendous fun and way bigger than I thought it would be. Strongly recommended. Typical side scrolling platforming gameplay, with emphasis on exploration and puzzles as well as the combat and platforming.
Death’s Door was so damn fun, and it felt quite fresh in a way I can’t describe. Its an isometric hack n slash game with some puzzle elements. Tells a cool story, and is a sequel/successor to Titan Souls, from the same devs.
AAAAXY was a lot of fun, and free and open source. Sort of like antichamber meets metroidvania. Short and sweet but also challenging!
Otherwise, as others mentioned, I can’t recommend these enough!:
I’m currently playing Betrayal At Krondor on my old Celeron PC. I played a couple of chapters a few years ago but I left it there, so I’ve started again and I’m on chapter 2. Since the game is slow and mostly text based, I think its gameplay has aged quite well. I’m playing it with MT-32 sound and music thanks to my MT32-Pi.
I’m also replaying Undertale on my PS Vita, it looks great on its OLED screen.
Been playing Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. Finished it last week and I am blown away. Game of the year for me. There is no challenge here. I read that there is a lot more of it after the story so I am going to continue.
It’s solid, I can find a full team in quick match in under a second. Lots of Hot Fixes on clearance 1 until people unlock the other jobs though. There’s no text or voice chat for communication in game which is something I would’ve liked.
The lack of text or voice chat seems like an odd choice. I kind of get the feeling that they meant for this to be played more with friends over random people, and they only added matchmaking because it’s standard, i’m not sure about that though
PC Gamer has given it 60/100 (which some take to mean a terrible, terrible, scathing review but to me, idk, 60/100 seems like a fun time?)
This has been a thing for ages, and I suspect it’s got some psychological explanation in how our brains are wired. But 5/10 is not an “average game”, it’s a quite bad one. In fact, anything below 5 is usually literally unplayable, despite 4/10 really being just below average. 7/10 is typically the score for “a fun time if it aligns with your interests, but by no means a great game”. Everything below 7 tends to be actively bad.
I see most of my faves have already been covered by others, so I’m going to add the Metroid Prime games. Unlike the mainline Metroid games, which are awesome in their own right, the Metroid Prime games are played from a first person perspective.
You still get to explore, you still get power-ups, but because you can scan almost anything with Samus’ visor, there’s some actual worldbuilding, which the mainline Metroid games didn’t really start doing until Metroid Fusion (which was alright, but Metroid Dread did a better job at worldbuilding, I feel). As for the platform, I played the GameCube versions on the Wii.
By memory this means we’ve only got Rise of and Shadow of - alongside the IV-VI Remastered still to come via Amazon, they’ve given the rest out themselves (though Epic has given others)
Is this the much talked about Steam integration? I’d doubt it (what manufacturer will let you use their service to give money to another platform?!), but…I do hope I am wrong!
It’s not just a throwaway line. It’s something they’ve been building up to in their public statements for a while now. The direction the wind is blowing in a lot of countries right now is that of breaking down walled gardens, often times via legislation. Not only is this a matter of them accepting this as an inevitability, but none of their own walled gardens are responsible for their own success. Yes, they’ve got a Windows Store, but it doesn’t make the kind of money that Apple’s does. Their competitive advantage is that they can say, “look how nice and open we are,” while Sony goes about business as usual. Meanwhile, in a world where the next Xbox is expected to just be a PC, they can legally play the Windows version of God of War on a machine called “Xbox”, and there’s nothing Sony can do to stop it. All of that exclusivity money they spent is worthless. And the appeal to an Xbox is that it plays all of those games and is a cheap entry point for Game Pass. The part of this most recent PR statement that throws me for a loop is how they’re getting the full backward compatibility with old Xbox games, because that’s the only piece of evidence that points to them making a traditional console and not a Windows PC in disguise.
As for what I’ve been playing, I made good progress in a number of games lately. I finally hit the turn in Devil May Cry 4. Even knowing roughly what it would be through cultural osmosis, it’s every bit as disappointing to get to the halfway point of the game and realize they’re just going to make you go through the exact same levels as the first half of the game but backwards. It’s sort of like making New Game + mandatory in order to see the ending.
I also played a number of quests in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and it looks like I’m at about the halfway point in the main story. The biggest problem with the game so far has been anything relating to its stealth systems, as they don’t give you much to go on, and the punishment is severe, but the story is pulling me along, and I finally leveled my way out of most of the game’s tedium.
And here or there, I’ve been playing some more missions in Borderlands 3. The upgrade in game feel is hard to overstate. The writing’s not great, but it’s not so unbearable like its reputation would lead me to believe. The skill trees are much better, the shooting feels much better, the quality of life is vastly improved; all keeping me pumped for the fourth game in a few months. The DRM situation isn’t my favorite, but I’ll deal with it.
EDIT: Breaking GOG news, Perfect Dark: Devil May Cry 1-4 are now available via GOG’s Good Old Games program. Of course they did this as I’m nearing the end of my journey through this series, but combined with Breath of Fire IV, Dino Crisis, and Resident Evil showing up on the service lately, I take this to mean they’ve got a good partnership with Capcom right now. I emulated DMC1-3 when I played through those lately, because I heard there were weird artifacts when playing the Steam versions through Proton, but maybe the fixed up GOG versions fare better.
I like the feeling of getting stronger and coming back to previously inaccessible places. Pretty much only play games on Steam.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention Hollow Knight yet. I won’t claim it on my list since I haven’t finished it yet, but it seems to be popular.
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